The main thing that I see potentially being difficult in this proposal project is being concise. You need to be really specific and compact in order for the proposal to be well put together, but at the same time you need to make sure that you have all of the necessary information that a potential funder would want to know. I feel as though my group, however, is really good at working together and being able to sort of check and balance eachother out. I find that we are able to help each other in making each other’s work more concise, easier than we do our own. It is for this reason that while I believe this area may be challenging, I don’t think that we will have any problem being able to pull through and make a well put together proposal.
The biggest challenge I foresee as we move deeper into this proposal project is carrying out extensive research in order to present the best solution possible to the problem we are addressing. Our proposals require extensive research that is very time-consuming including obtaining useful statistics, acquiring knowledge about the geography of our problem, and weighing out the possible solutions in regard to both how successful and feasible they are. Finding the appropriate grant for our proposal and ensuring the funding is appropriate is also something that we may face difficulty in doing, along with the proper allocation of those funds. For one of our proposals, a big concern is that it is overambitious, especially for something that is traditionally a corporate or government responsibility, rather than that assigned to nonprofit organizations. Something that I also am a bit stressed about is being able to tell a story to the granting foundation in order to grab their attention and keep them engaged throughout our proposal, we grant proposals involve a competition aspect when it comes to being selected. At the same time, I also must keep in mind the importance of being concise, as our proposal idea was quite lengthy and repetitive, even incorporating details that didn’t contribute to the focus of the problem and solution.
I think one of the biggest challenges that will come with working deeper into our proposal is being able to use word/page count efficiently. Having to condense a lot of information in such a way that is professional and compelling enough to warrant grant money can be difficult, as you’re bound to have to leave things out. Deciding what is most important to discuss or mention in your proposal is crucial. Another challenge could be researching and collecting statistics. You might find a survey that totally supports your cause, but it could be from an unreputable source or from ten years ago. Finding enough recent and reputable information may be a challenge. Coordinating four people writing one document could be challenging, too. Communication is going to be really important and everyone should generally be on the same page. If people are in different headspaces when we’re writing our part, together the proposal won’t be coherent.
I think the only challenge my group may experience in the future is finding time within all our schedules to meet for outside-of-class planning. It is far easier to be able to collaborate in our three hour period because it’s specific designated time to work. Where all three of our are very involved in our academics along with other commitments, times that line up are limited. I think the only way to combat this is clear communication and planning ahead. So far, we’ve done a great deal of communicating through our shared group chat on a regular basis. I think doing this keeps us all grounded in what days/times we can dedicate to the work. I also trust my group-mates in holding them accountable for what they agree to work on if we decide to split work into individual portions, which may have to be a future option. Overall, I feel confident about overcoming any possible roadblocks my group may face.
One of the more challenging pieces of our proposal will be having exact numbers. It will take a lot of research to figure out exactly how much money we would need, to find locations for our boxes, and figure out exactly what we would be able to grow. Our project is easy to imagine, but once you start getting into specifics, it gets quite complicated. My group and I are going to have to make sure that we are on the same page about everything to make sure that all of our information is the same. Each member of our group is very detail-oriented, so I imagine that we will be able to organize our numbers well. With each of us double checking each other’s work, we’ll be able to ensure consistency in our proposal.
When it comes to our pitch and our project, I liked the work we put forward. The feedback we received was very helpful and insightful in order for us to reword our mission. The most important critique we got was our use of demographics. We pitched our idea to benefit low-income and special needs students. The problem is how will these groups work together and how we will compensate each student. That overall is the main problem that we face during our re-work period. However, I believe a more easy fix is to just address and promote the program to all but have a focus on helping those who struggle. Though to be fair, it is a broad goal to tackle and there might be more daunting task. However, I have faith in my group that we will be able to iron out this issue and hopefully find more or refine anything if needed.
Moving deeper into this proposal project, I honestly don’t see many challenges ahead. Although I know there will be moments when my team members and I have to problem-solve or rework things, I don’t foresee that being a challenge. I feel very comfortable knowing that my group members and I are all hard workers and good problem solvers. With the three of us working together, any “challenges” will likely be a semi-quick fix. The only time those issues would become a true challenge would be if our group lost communication. However, that is not something I think we will come across. I feel that, at this point, our proposal has a strong backbone and is thoroughly researched, meaning there will be no surprises when we draft our grant proposal later on. And again, if there are issues later on, I don’t think they will be a challenge for my team; if anything, they may just be time-consuming fixes.
I foresee two main issues as our group moves deeper into this proposal project. First, the financial side of this project is going to be a learning curve for me. I am not adept at making budgets for non-profits only for personal saving and spending. I think it would be helpful to study models from other non-profits or past group projects. However, I believe this is the area that will challenge me personally the most. Our project has to figure out how much money we need to get a grant for and how the breakdown will work.
Secondly our project is very community based and relies on input from communities to be implemented. I am not sure how specific we need to be in our proposal in representing the needs of the communities we are looking at. This challenge will be the main factor in the direction that our proposal will take. I believe some outside research and digging on similar projects will help us evaluate our best course of action, but I do not want to misrepresent the needs of communities we are writing about.
Well now that we’re heading towards the project, we’re gonna have to be more thorough with researching not only budget which is its own can of worms that no doubt we’ll understand later int the future in this class specifically. Other than that we’d have to look into resources and specific information about our project as well as making feasible innovations to make it more unique, since this class is more about the grant writing rather than the specifics of what kind of project my team is doing we’ll have to put in the effort ourselves outside of class. But we’re well communicators and I’m sure we can make time and effort to learn more about our scope and how to do thorough research that goes into this grant. Won’t be the easiest part of the class but, shouldn’t overwhelm us.
9 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 10”
The main thing that I see potentially being difficult in this proposal project is being concise. You need to be really specific and compact in order for the proposal to be well put together, but at the same time you need to make sure that you have all of the necessary information that a potential funder would want to know. I feel as though my group, however, is really good at working together and being able to sort of check and balance eachother out. I find that we are able to help each other in making each other’s work more concise, easier than we do our own. It is for this reason that while I believe this area may be challenging, I don’t think that we will have any problem being able to pull through and make a well put together proposal.
The biggest challenge I foresee as we move deeper into this proposal project is carrying out extensive research in order to present the best solution possible to the problem we are addressing. Our proposals require extensive research that is very time-consuming including obtaining useful statistics, acquiring knowledge about the geography of our problem, and weighing out the possible solutions in regard to both how successful and feasible they are. Finding the appropriate grant for our proposal and ensuring the funding is appropriate is also something that we may face difficulty in doing, along with the proper allocation of those funds. For one of our proposals, a big concern is that it is overambitious, especially for something that is traditionally a corporate or government responsibility, rather than that assigned to nonprofit organizations. Something that I also am a bit stressed about is being able to tell a story to the granting foundation in order to grab their attention and keep them engaged throughout our proposal, we grant proposals involve a competition aspect when it comes to being selected. At the same time, I also must keep in mind the importance of being concise, as our proposal idea was quite lengthy and repetitive, even incorporating details that didn’t contribute to the focus of the problem and solution.
I think one of the biggest challenges that will come with working deeper into our proposal is being able to use word/page count efficiently. Having to condense a lot of information in such a way that is professional and compelling enough to warrant grant money can be difficult, as you’re bound to have to leave things out. Deciding what is most important to discuss or mention in your proposal is crucial. Another challenge could be researching and collecting statistics. You might find a survey that totally supports your cause, but it could be from an unreputable source or from ten years ago. Finding enough recent and reputable information may be a challenge. Coordinating four people writing one document could be challenging, too. Communication is going to be really important and everyone should generally be on the same page. If people are in different headspaces when we’re writing our part, together the proposal won’t be coherent.
I think the only challenge my group may experience in the future is finding time within all our schedules to meet for outside-of-class planning. It is far easier to be able to collaborate in our three hour period because it’s specific designated time to work. Where all three of our are very involved in our academics along with other commitments, times that line up are limited. I think the only way to combat this is clear communication and planning ahead. So far, we’ve done a great deal of communicating through our shared group chat on a regular basis. I think doing this keeps us all grounded in what days/times we can dedicate to the work. I also trust my group-mates in holding them accountable for what they agree to work on if we decide to split work into individual portions, which may have to be a future option. Overall, I feel confident about overcoming any possible roadblocks my group may face.
One of the more challenging pieces of our proposal will be having exact numbers. It will take a lot of research to figure out exactly how much money we would need, to find locations for our boxes, and figure out exactly what we would be able to grow. Our project is easy to imagine, but once you start getting into specifics, it gets quite complicated. My group and I are going to have to make sure that we are on the same page about everything to make sure that all of our information is the same. Each member of our group is very detail-oriented, so I imagine that we will be able to organize our numbers well. With each of us double checking each other’s work, we’ll be able to ensure consistency in our proposal.
When it comes to our pitch and our project, I liked the work we put forward. The feedback we received was very helpful and insightful in order for us to reword our mission. The most important critique we got was our use of demographics. We pitched our idea to benefit low-income and special needs students. The problem is how will these groups work together and how we will compensate each student. That overall is the main problem that we face during our re-work period. However, I believe a more easy fix is to just address and promote the program to all but have a focus on helping those who struggle. Though to be fair, it is a broad goal to tackle and there might be more daunting task. However, I have faith in my group that we will be able to iron out this issue and hopefully find more or refine anything if needed.
Moving deeper into this proposal project, I honestly don’t see many challenges ahead. Although I know there will be moments when my team members and I have to problem-solve or rework things, I don’t foresee that being a challenge. I feel very comfortable knowing that my group members and I are all hard workers and good problem solvers. With the three of us working together, any “challenges” will likely be a semi-quick fix. The only time those issues would become a true challenge would be if our group lost communication. However, that is not something I think we will come across. I feel that, at this point, our proposal has a strong backbone and is thoroughly researched, meaning there will be no surprises when we draft our grant proposal later on. And again, if there are issues later on, I don’t think they will be a challenge for my team; if anything, they may just be time-consuming fixes.
I foresee two main issues as our group moves deeper into this proposal project. First, the financial side of this project is going to be a learning curve for me. I am not adept at making budgets for non-profits only for personal saving and spending. I think it would be helpful to study models from other non-profits or past group projects. However, I believe this is the area that will challenge me personally the most. Our project has to figure out how much money we need to get a grant for and how the breakdown will work.
Secondly our project is very community based and relies on input from communities to be implemented. I am not sure how specific we need to be in our proposal in representing the needs of the communities we are looking at. This challenge will be the main factor in the direction that our proposal will take. I believe some outside research and digging on similar projects will help us evaluate our best course of action, but I do not want to misrepresent the needs of communities we are writing about.
Well now that we’re heading towards the project, we’re gonna have to be more thorough with researching not only budget which is its own can of worms that no doubt we’ll understand later int the future in this class specifically. Other than that we’d have to look into resources and specific information about our project as well as making feasible innovations to make it more unique, since this class is more about the grant writing rather than the specifics of what kind of project my team is doing we’ll have to put in the effort ourselves outside of class. But we’re well communicators and I’m sure we can make time and effort to learn more about our scope and how to do thorough research that goes into this grant. Won’t be the easiest part of the class but, shouldn’t overwhelm us.